News From the Red Desert (2 page)

Behind them, construction was going strong. Rows of tents being assembled, engineers and signals guys putting up antenna arrays. A stack of crates thirty metres wide and nearly as long as the airstrip sat beside the tarmac. Columns of trucks were coming off cargo planes. Antonovs disgorged bulldozers. A small hospital. Laundry. All military now wore clean and unaltered (no sleeves cut off) combat uniforms. The clerks and cooks proudly carried loaded pistols strapped to their legs. A sign in the dining facility said that if you weren't carrying your personal weapon you would not be fed. After years of peacetime theatre, this was no drill.

The sergeant and the private, along with the rest of the Special Forces lined up on the tarmac, had shaved off their beards. They all looked a decade younger than they had a month earlier. Though they weren't
talking now, earlier they had assured one another that they were pleased to be going home, looking forward to getting laid.

The last couple of days they had had Don't Beat Your Wife class, with the shrinks and social workers. Adjustment strategies. Effective and Respectful Communication. Alcohol:
THE NUMBER ONE RISK FACTOR
. This was when it really hit them that they were leaving the theatre of operations, and they had grown subdued and sarcastic. The uniformed social workers were not unaccustomed to this, though it did piss off the company commanders.

The private from Bar Harbor stepped from one foot to the other and shifted his pack. These had been a dope couple-three months, but he wasn't going to hang around when it was time to go. It wasn't in his nature. And he wasn't interested in doing any more sentry duty. That is not why he had done the jump course and then the Ranger course and then the never-ending SF training. Not to fucking be a fucking sentry for fucking signalmen, that was for fucking sure.

The sergeant from Boise was not ready to go. In his mind, this was just getting interesting. He knew a hundred words of Pashto now and was beginning to like the language. Even among the CIA dudes, the supposed linguists, no one had known much Pashto—at the beginning there had been three fluent Pashto speakers in the whole organization. The Peshawar station chief had had to use an interpreter. Which is why the sergeant was reviewing the personal pronouns in his head as he stood there on the tarmac. He wanted to come back. He had spent years training for this work. Already the tide was taking him out. But he'd be back on the flood.

As the planes were loading up the Special Forces infantry reluctantly returning home, an emaciated twenty-eight-year-old British man with the startled features of a sock monkey arrived at the airfield. Stewart Robinson claimed to have walked there from the Persian border. He had with him a large Afghan dog he called Fido. The soldiers who had to
deal with him assumed, mostly because they had been told to deal with him, that he had some sort of affiliation. Probably as a spook. It was agreed by those who had to deal with him that, if he was a spy, he was not a very good one. You're not supposed to notice spooks—or if you do, only because they never say anything. His handler for the day, an Air Force Reserve lieutenant, watched him from behind his Oakleys as he pretended to watch the SF load up. He was not delighted by this assignment. Robinson patted his dog and studied the lines of soldiers. He'd mentioned that he had been one himself, albeit briefly. That was a more difficult and less interesting life than he could have enjoyed, he had told his handler. You have to admire people who can do it. His Air Force handler had hardly nodded.
Where had he gotten that fucking dog? Had it been vaccinated for anything? Who says “albeit” in conversation?

“So how come you're walking across Afghanistan?”

Robinson had answered this question many times and did not look away from the airfield. “It started out rather impetuously. Then I just kept going.”

“Can you speak Pashto?”

“I read Persian at Oxford. Dari is a dialect of Persian.”

“Has it helped you here?”

“More in the north. Kandahar, not so much, and I'm not going to go any farther south. It's handy to be able to talk to people. Especially when you get into trouble.”

“So did you get into trouble?”

The skinny man looked at the Air Force subaltern and then back at the airfield. “No,” he said.

“How much longer are you going to be with us?”

“Do you mean here on the base, or in the of-the-firmament sense?”

“Here, at KAF.”

“I'm leaving tomorrow.”

“Are you in a hurry?”

“There are things I want to see before they go away.”

“Like what?”

“I won't know until I see them.”

“My boss is gonna want to know where you're headed.”

“Northeast. Kabul.”

His minder wanted to ask him, How? How do you walk through this country of perpetual war, so obviously a foreigner, with a huge dog, unclean to Muslims, and no weapon, no friends and just a little bit of money? How do you not freeze to death every night you sleep outside, and how do you persuade terrified villagers to give you food and how do you just walk into the middle of the busiest new US military base in the world, as a non-American yet, and not get tossed into an interrogation room?

But he did not ask those questions. Instead, he said, “Do you want to go get some lunch?”

Robinson pictured the forced conversation and boiled food pouches. “No thanks, I ate this morning.”

He looked up at the outline of Ghar Killay, looming over the airstrip, and narrowed his eyes. He wondered how long it would take to climb it. His dog sensed that thought and groaned. The lieutenant figured the dog was hungry.

A hundred metres behind them, Deirdre O'Malley watched the two men and the dog closely. She had only gotten her press credentials two weeks earlier and had been in KAF for a few days. She had not filed a story yet and was getting heat from her boss, who reminded her daily that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She kept asking the press liaison officers about combat ops, about local resistance—their replies were nebulous on those subjects, but they told her they did have a great story about a set of triplet airframe techs who were all posted to the base. Uplifting. Good for morale.

What interested her was this emaciated Brit. She had heard he walked in from Iran. Apparently he had his own book in mind and wasn't
inclined to give his story away—half a dozen of the guys in the press tent had already approached him. It was understandable, on one level, if that's what he was—adventurer writer idiot guy—but that didn't mesh with anything else: his access to the base, his fluency in Dari. His survival. The fact that he hadn't been picked up by a patrol and shoved into a sack.

Master Sergeant Demetrios Anakopoulus had been in Kandahar for two months and the supply point he operated had become the hub of the whole base. He watched his men arrange the crates of materiel as they came off the transports. In here somewhere were pallets of steel framing with which he was to construct a warehouse to keep the rain off the rest of the crates. Warehouses, actually. The field of crates stretched nearly the ten thousand feet of the airstrip. Rifle ammunition. Surgical instruments. Field rations. Bottled water. Uniforms. Boots. Pool tables. Weight machines. Treadmills. Canvas tents. Sunscreen. Computers. Radios. Ten thousand different field manuals. Bread ovens. Telephone poles. Anakopoulus surveyed it all and felt a kind of pride. He liked belonging to an organization capable of bringing the makings of a small city from twelve time zones away in a week. You could preserve civilization with just what he had here. Like logisticians anywhere, he thought of the pallets as his property; he had signed for them, and was responsible for them all. Maybe fifty million dollars' worth of stuff. Maybe more. Until all this was distributed, he had the most important job on the base. Not that anyone would actually say that. But it was the case. You could tell from the number of times his boss and his boss's boss called him every day. His bosses could use a bit of calmness. Anakopoulus was due to retire in a year and he knew what he was doing; he just wanted to be left alone to do his job.